Masters Of War

Come you masters of war You that build all the guns You that build the death planes You that build all the bombs You that hide behind walls You that hide behind desks I just want you to know I can see through your masks. You that never done nothin' But build to destroy You play with my world Like it's your little toy You put a gun in my hand And you hide from my eyes And you turn and run farther When the fast bullets fly. Like Judas of old You lie and deceive A world war can be won You want me to believe But I see through your eyes And I see through your brain Like I see through the water That runs down my drain. You fasten all the triggers For the others to fire Then you set back and watch When the death count gets higher You hide in your mansion' As young people's blood Flows out of their bodies And is buried in the mud. You've thrown the worst fear That can ever be hurled Fear to bring children Into the world For threatening my baby Unborn and unnamed You ain't worth the blood That runs in your veins. How much do I know To talk out of turn You might say that I'm young You might say I'm unlearned But there's one thing I know Though I'm younger than you That even Jesus would never Forgive what you do. Let me ask you one question Is your money that good Will it buy you forgiveness Do you think that it could I think you will find When your death takes its toll All the money you made Will never buy back your soul. And I hope that you die And your death'll come soon I will follow your casket In the pale afternoon And I'll watch while you're lowered Down to your deathbed And I'll stand over your grave 'Til I'm sure that you're dead.------- Bob Dylan 1963

So happy together: Algeria’s then president Abdelaziz Bouteflika with George W Bush in 2001. Win McNamee / Reuters

As the French-led military operation begins, Jeremy Keenan reveals how the US and Algeria have been sponsoring terror in the Sahara.

On 12 October 2012, the UN Security Council voted unanimously in favour of a French-drafted resolution asking Mali’s government to draw up plans for a military mission to re-establish control over the northern part of Mali, an area of the Sahara bigger than France. Known as Azawad by local Tuareg people, northern Mali has been under the control of Islamist extremists following a Tuareg rebellion at the beginning of the year. For several months, the international media have been referring to northern Mali as ‘Africa’s Afghanistan’, with calls for international military intervention becoming inexorable.

Calling the shots: a US Special Forces soldier training Malian troops in Kita, May 2010. Alfred de Montesquiou

While the media have provided abundant descriptive coverage of the course of events and atrocities committed in Azawad since the outbreak in January of what was ostensibly just another Tuareg rebellion, some pretty basic questions have not been addressed. No journalist has asked, or at least answered satisfactorily, how this latest Tuareg rebellion was hijacked, almost as soon as it started, by a few hundred Islamist extremists.

In short, the world’s media have failed to explain the situation in Azawad. That is because the real story of what has been going on there borders on the incredible, taking us deep into the murky reaches of Western intelligence and its hook-up with Algeria’s secret service.

The real story of what has been going on borders on the incredible, taking us deep into the murky reaches of Western intelligence

Azawad’s current nightmare is generally explained as the unintended outcome of the overthrow of Libya’s Muammar al-Qadafi. That is true in so far as his downfall precipitated the return to the Sahel (Niger and Mali) of thousands of angry, disillusioned and well-armed Tuareg fighters who had gone to seek their metaphorical fortunes by serving the Qadafi regime. But this was merely the last straw in a decade of increasing exploitation, repression and marginalization that has underpinned an ongoing cycle of Tuareg protest, unrest and rebellion. In that respect, Libya was the catalyst for the Azawad rebellion, not its underlying cause. Rather, the catastrophe now being played out in Mali is the inevitable outcome of the way in which the Global War On Terror has been inserted into the Sahara-Sahel by the US, in concert with Algerian intelligence operatives, since 2002.

Why Algeria and the US needed terrorism

When Abdelaziz Bouteflika took over as Algeria’s President in 1999, the country was faced with two major problems. One was its standing in the world. The role of the army and the DRS (the Algerian intelligence service, see box Algeria’s ‘state terrorism’) in the ‘Dirty War’ had made Algeria a pariah state. The other was that the army, the core institution of the state, was lacking modern high-tech weaponry as a result of international sanctions and arms embargoes.

The solution to both these problems lay in Washington. During the Clinton era, relations between the US and Algeria had fallen to a particularly low level. However, with a Republican victory in the November 2000 election, Algeria’s President Bouteflika, an experienced former Foreign Minister, quickly made his sentiments known to the new US administration and was invited in July 2001 to a summit meeting in Washington with President Bush. Bush listened sympathetically to Bouteflika’s account of how his country had dealt with the fight against terrorists and to his request for specific military equipment that would enable his army to maintain peace, security and stability in Algeria.

At that moment, Algeria had a greater need for US support than vice-versa. But that was soon to change. The 9/11 terrorist attacks precipitated a whole new era in US-Algerian relations. Over the next four years, Bush and Bouteflika met six more times to develop a largely covert and highly duplicitous alliance. READ MORE

But since the U.S.A. and a few other select fellow travelers have this special relationship with these Zionist criminals.

All will be swept under the rug.

Why are the right for life people not speaking out. Where are the religious leaders on this? Why is all of humanity not calling Israel out on this.

The Israeli government has admitted to routinely forcing women of Ethiopian origin to be injected with long-acting birth control.

The admission followed an investigation by Israeli television journalist Gal Gabbay in which women who immigrated from Ethiopia eight years ago said they were told they would not be allowed into Israel unless they agreed to be injected with Depo-Provera, Haaretzreported.

In a letter published Sunday in Haaretz, Israel Health Minister Director General Prof. Ron Gamzu instructed the country's four health maintenance organizations to stop the practice and instructed "all gynecologists in the HMOs not to renew prescriptions for Depo-Provera for women of Ethiopian origin if for any reason there is concern that they might not understand the ramifications of the treatment," Haaretzreported. READ MORE

According to an account that Hagel later gave, and is reported here for the first time, he told Obama: “We are at a time where there is a new world order.

"We don’t control it. You must question everything, every assumption, everything they” — the military and diplomats — “tell you. Any assumption 10 years old is out of date. You need to question our role. You need to question the military. You need to question what are we using the military for."

Hagel warned the president about getting "bogged down" in Afghanistan and voiced concern over the deployment of 51,000 additional troops sent at the time to fight in the war.

The Post reports Hagel went so far as to say in 2011: “The president has not had commander-in-chief control of the Pentagon since Bush senior was president,” Hagel said privately in 2011. READ MORE

From top to bot­tom: Ger­man net private wealth; wealth of top 10% (who own 63% of all wealth); wealth of poorest 10%

A group of Ger­man trades uni­ons, aca­dem­ics, and mil­it­ants have attemp­ted to seize back the clock as a power­ful mode of polit­ical expres­sion with their “Wealth Clock” (“Reichtum­suhr”). It seems to be a dir­ect response to the rel­at­ive suc­cess of the US’s National Debt Clock, insti­tuted in the late 80s by prop­erty developer Sey­mour Durst, in impress­ing into the pub­lic con­scious­ness the claimed urgency of deal­ing with the US national debt, as a route to neo­lib­eral aus­ter­ity measures. Leaving aside the many argu­ments that can be lev­elled against Durst’s fears, the image of a con­stant up-​ticking of a national debt has had its echoes in European states, not least Bri­tain and Ger­many as flag-​bearers for austerity.

Of course, the National Debt Clock is only a genu­ine quality-​assured rip-​off; the ori­ginal is the Dooms­day Clock which helped express the fear of Mutu­ally Assured Destruc­tion dur­ing the Cold War (and still oper­ates today). One won­ders whether the fear that accom­pan­ied move­ments towards mid­night in this earlier ana­log clock to some extent invests itself in the bound­less growth of its digital debt-​oriented cousin. It is also quite inter­est­ing that the Dooms­day Clock, with its regard for the ten­sions of inter­na­tional state blocks, should have taken of the form of determ­in­ate finitude (mid­night was the end), whereas the cap­it­al­ist ori­gin­ated debt clock should place as its hori­zon infinitude itself — though to be fair the National Debt Clock had to be replaced, in 2004, by a big­ger clock as the Fed wal­lowed in its role as printer of the global reserve currency. READ MORE

The soundtrack then was Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Motown and Stax. Now it's Goooooooooood morning, Mali! Yet the soundtrack can't be something as transcendental as Rokia Traore's Dounia, or as delightfully psychedelic as Amadou and Mariam's Dimanche a Bamako. It's way more menacing. Something like - he's inescapable - Hendrix in Machine Gun.

Timing - as in the expansion of the Global War on Terror (GWOT) - is everything. Carefully choreographed Libyan blowback in the

Sahel could not be a better replacement for NATO raising a monster white flag in Afghanistan. There's no Goooooood morning, Kabul! anymore; there's just the sorry countdown to see the last NATO helicopter leaving Bagram - Saigon 1975-style.

The Economist - the voice of the City of London - is even promoting "Afrighanistan". There are nuances, of course. NATO had its ass kicked in Afghanistan by all sorts of Pashtun factions bundled up as "Taliban". But NATO "won" in Libya. With a certainly foreseen spin-off; the Islamist brigade which attacked the In Amenas gas field complex in the Algerian desert was using NATO-facilitated Kalashnikov AK-104s, F5 rockets, 60 mm gun-mortars and, in a nifty NATOGCC fashion touch, the "chocolate chip" camouflage Qatar handed out to the NATO rebels in Libya (yellow flak jackets with brown patches). What next, the cover of Uomo Vogue?

I'm your bogeyman, turn me onInevitably, that most convenient of bogeymen - al-Qaeda - is once again back in fashion, the whole nebula of Salafi-jihadi groups and sub-groups promoted by the French-Anglo-American triad as the root of all evil in Northern Africa (but not in Libya, where they were exalted as "freedom fighters").

Mokhtar Belmokhtar, one of the founding members of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), is for all practical purposes an easily digestible Osama bin Laden remix. Belmokhtar was a classic "Arab Afghan" - part of that multinational legion trained by the ISI/CIA axis to fight the Soviets in 1980s Afghanistan. When he was back in Algeria in 1993 he joined the local jihad, as part of the Salafi Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC).

In Barack Obama's inauguration speech for his second term in office the usual assertions of American exceptionalism were made. In his book Patterns of Empire: the British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present, Professor Julian Go argues that, far from being exceptional, the United States is closely emulating the behaviour of previous empires. He discussed his ideas with NLP's Alex Doherty...READ MORE

The Pan-Asian Anchor: Hillary Clinton heats up Diaoyu row:This woman is the most over rated Sec. of State ever. She is waaaaaay out of her league as usual. Her Neo-liberal code speak has done only harm to America and the world in general.She is a soliciting war hawk for the Uber Elite. She should do the whole world a favor by retiring in Arkansass and gently fade away.

And the winner of the Oscar for Best Sequel of 2013 goes to... The Global War on Terror (GWOT), a Pentagon production. Abandon all hope those who thought the whole thing was over with the cinematographic snuffing out of "Geronimo", aka Osama bin Laden, further reduced to a fleeting cameo in the torture-enabling flick Zero Dark Thirty.

It's now official - coming from the mouth of the lion, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey, and duly posted at the AFRICOM site, the Pentagon's weaponized African branch. Exit "historical" al-Qaeda, holed up somewhere in the Waziristans, in the Pakistani tribal areas; enter al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). In Dempsey's words, AQIM "is a threat not only to the country of Mali, but the region, and if... left unaddressed, could in fact become a global threat."

With Mali now elevated to the status of a "threat" to the whole world, GWOT is proven to be really open-ended. The Pentagon doesn't do irony; when, in the early 2000s, armchair warriors coined the expression "The Long War", they really meant it.Even under President Obama 2.0's "leading from behind" doctrine, the Pentagon is unmistakably gunning for war in Mali - and not only of the shadow variety. [1] General Carter Ham, AFRICOM's commander, already operates under the assumption Islamists in Mali will "attack American interests".

Thus, the first 100 US military "advisers" are being sent to Niger, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Togo and Ghana - the six member-nations of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) that will compose an African army tasked (by the United Nations) to reconquer (invade?) the parts of Mali under the Islamist sway of AQIM, its splinter group MUJAO and the Ansar ed-Dine militia. This African mini-army, of course, is paid for by the West.

Students of the Vietnam War will be the first to note that sending "advisers" was the first step of the subsequent quagmire. And on a definitely un-Pentagonese ironic aside, the US over these past few years did train Malian troops. A lot of them duly deserted. As for the lavishly, Fort Benning-trained Captain Amadou Haya Sanogo, not only did he lead a military coup against an elected Mali government but also created the conditions for the rise of the Islamists.

Nobody, though, is paying attention. General Carter Ham is so excited with the prospect of AFRICOM accumulating more gigs than Led Zeppelin in its heyday, and himself acquiring iconic savior status (Carter of Africa?), that he's bungling up his data. [2] The general seems to have forgotten that AFRICOM - and then the North Atlantic treaty Organization (NATO) - irretrievably supported (and weaponized) the NATO rebels in Libya who were the fighting vanguard in the war against Muammar Gaddafi. The general does know that AQIM has "a lot of money and they have a lot of weapons".

But he believes it was "mercenaries paid by Gaddafi" who abandoned Libya and brought their weapons, and "many of them came to northern Mali". No, general, they were not Gaddafi mercenaries; most were NATO rebels, the same ones who attacked the US Consulate, actually a CIA station, in Benghazi, the same ones commuting to Syria, the same ones let loose all across the Sahel.

O is a center-right republocrat. He is a corporatista just as others before him. He has now grown accustomed to being a 'war of choice'president. Do not be fooled by his exit plan for Afghanistan. He is the facade puppet for the powers that be that promote perpetual war. Africa and lands in Asia will be their new plan of attack for new choke points and natural resource thievery.
The International Bankster Cartel, along with the Military Industrial Complex have their guy in office for another term. They win no matter which letter [d] or [r] the president or our congresscritters wear on their lapels.
Beware of false flags. For all we know we might have already seen one over the weekend.

The movie is FICTION, just like everything else associated with the man. They just make it up as they go along.

Washington, DC, January 17, 2013 – The poster for the blockbuster movie Zero Dark Thirty features black lines of redaction over the title, which unintentionally illustrate the most accurate take-away from the film - that most of the official record of the hunt for Osama bin Laden is still shrouded in secrecy, according to the National Security Archive's ZD30 briefing book, posted today at www.nsarchive.org. The U.S. government's recalcitrance over releasing information directly to the public about the twenty-first century's most important intelligence search and military raid, and its decision instead to grant the film's producers exclusive and unprecedented access to classified information about the operation, means that for the time being – for bad or good – Hollywood has become the public's "account of record" for Operation Neptune Spear.

As often happens when the government declines on secrecy grounds to provide an authoritative account of a controversial event, leaked, unauthorized and untrustworthy versions rush to fill the void. In this extraordinary case, a Hollywood motion picture, with apparent White House, CIA, and Pentagon blessing and despite its historical inaccuracies, is now the closest thing to the official story behind the pursuit of bin Laden.

Zero Dark Thirty 's screenwriter, Mark Boal, has claimed that the film is "a movie not a documentary" and should not be treated as history. But the U.S. government's widely reported support and its official silence about the raid have made Zero Dark Thirty (the military designation for 12:30 AM) more than a mere thriller. Today, in an effort to balance the record, to the extent currently possible, the National Security Archive has collected, posted, and analyzed in one Electronic Briefing Book all of the available official documents on the mission to kill the notorious al-Qaeda leader. The documents include:

The earliest known official document mentioning Osama bin Laden, a 1996 CIA biographical sketch and his FBI "Most Wanted Fugitive" poster which spelled his name "Usama," but included his now ubiquitous mug shot.

A leaked memo from Guantanamo Bay, describing the "Autonomy of a lead" and how the CIA determined that Abu al-Kuwaiti, once Khalid Sheikh Mohammad's courier in Kandahar, may have escaped Tora Bora with bin Laden, and continued to deliver his messages.

Then-CIA Director George Tenet prior to testifying before the 9-11 commission on Capitol Hill, April 14, 2004. (Photo: Doug Mills / The New York Times)

Offering new revelations about the CIA's role in shutting down military intelligence penetration of al-Qaeda, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer joins a growing list of government officials accusing former CIA director George Tenet of misleading federal investigators and sharing some degree of blame for the 9/11 attacks.

A decorated ex-clandestine operative for the Pentagon offers new revelations about the role the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) played in the shut-down of the military's notorious Able Danger program, alleged to have identified five of the 9/11 hijackers inside America more than a year before the attacks.

Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer joins a growing list of government officials accusing former CIA director George Tenet of misleading federal bodies and sharing some degree of blame for the attacks. Shaffer also adds to a picture emerging of the CIA's Bin Laden unit as having actively prevented other areas of intelligence, law enforcement and defense from properly carrying out their counterterrorism functions in the run-up to September 2001.

Shaffer spoke to documentary filmmakers John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski in late 2011, on the day Judicial Watch successfully forced the Department of Defense (DOD) to declassify many Able Danger documents through their Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit. The materials newly in the public domain allowed Shaffer to speak more candidly than ever before. While he maintains the DOD bureaucracy was always the main obstacle for Able Danger, he offers fresh disclosures on the role played by the CIA in the shut-down of its military offensive.

In the wake of the devastating African embassy bombings of 1998, which left more than 200 dead, US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) - responsible for the Pentagon's secret commando units - brought together specialists from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to begin mapping the al-Qaeda network. Based in the Information Dominance Center - also referred to as Land Information Warfare Activity, or LIWA - at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, the team's advanced data-mining software found connections between known terrorists and subjects with matching profiles. This highly classified project was code-named Able Danger. READ MORE

Saturday, January 19, 2013

Marx 101 is a series of meetings to introduce the Marxist classics to activists in the twenty first century. Elaine Graham Leigh concludes the present series with a look at Lenin's Left-Wing Communism

The Bolshevik revolution in Russia in October 1917 was a great achievement, but the Bolsheviks’ ability to establish a real socialist society depended on it being not one isolated proletarian success, but the first of a series of revolutions across the developed world. Russia was a poor, backward country, meaning that even after the revolution, people were facing considerable hardship. It was also surrounded by hostile bourgeois regimes, with foreign intervention helping the anti-Bolshevik armies in the civil war, which lasted until 1922. As early as January 1918, Lenin said that ‘without the revolution in Germany, we are doomed’.

The success of the Russian revolution was an inspiration to workers around the world, but how they could apply its lessons to their own struggles was not always obvious. Lenin believed that repetitions of the Russian revolution were historically inevitable, in the sense that the period was a revolutionary one, but this did not mean that these revolutions would simply happen without effort. So the question was how, in this revolutionary period, the communists in Germany, Britain, Holland, Austria, Italy and so on could learn the right lessons from the experience of the Bolsheviks in Russia and take advantage of the objective conditions which made revolution possible.

“Every good person deep down is an anarchist,” said Paul Avrich, who died in 2006 after spending his academic life at Queens College and writing 10 books on anarchism that included The Haymarket Tragedy,Sacco and Vanzetti, and two oral histories – Anarchist Portraits andAnarchist Voices. Shortly before he died, Avrich requested that his daughter, the author and editor Karen Avrich, complete a manuscript that he had been working on for many, many years. Their collaboration is the book Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman. True to the title, the book portrays the journey of the Berkman-Goldman friendship – their relationships with each other and with friends and comrades. Relationships I might add that included both the Red and Black. Sasha and Emma both began life in Lithuania. They met in New York and the odyssey included their lives as individuals and partners in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, Germany, and France before Emma Goldman ultimately moved to Canada after Sasha’s death.

Sasha and Emma is multi-layered and thus teaches us a great deal about the people, anarchism in the United States and throughout the World, oppression in both the capitalist west and the Soviet Union, and the economic, social, and political conflicts that are still very much with us today. For the novice, the book provides a great introduction to the breadth of anarchism through the lives of Berkman and Goldman. For all of us there is much to learn about Sasha, but for people who have read Living My Life, Emma’s memoir, or Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader, or Candace Falk’s fine biography, Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman, there is less new stuff to ponder.

While both Goldman and Berkman were clearly politicized before they arrived in the United States, both people were greatly affected by what Paul Avrich called The Haymarket Tragedy. An event that occurred in Chicago on May 4, 1886, three months before Sasha arrived in the United States. Anarchists met at the Square to protest police brutality and when police invaded the protest, a bomb was thrown killing one person and injuring others. Police responded by firing into the crowd and civilians as well as police were injured and killed. While the bomber was never caught, eight anarchists were tried and four, Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engel, and Adolph Fischer were hung. Sasha, wrote two books that you might want to read along with Emma’s books mentioned above, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist and Now and After: The ABC of Communist Anarchism. In the latter he addressed the Haymarket Tragedy. READ MORE

LONDON - One's got to love the sound of a Frenchman's Mirage 2000 fighter jet in the morning. Smells like... a delicious neo-colonial breakfast in Hollandaise sauce. Make it quagmire sauce.

Apparently, it's a no-brainer. Mali holds 15.8 million people - with a per capita gross domestic product of only around US$1,000 a year and average life expectancy of only 51 years - in a territory twice the size of France (per capital GDP $35,000 and upwards). Now almost two-thirds of this territory is occupied by heavily weaponized Islamist outfits. What next? Bomb, baby, bomb.

So welcome to the latest African war; Chad-based French Mirages and Gazelle helicopters, plus a smatter of France-based Rafales bombing evil Islamist jihadis in northern Mali. Business is good; French president Francois Hollande spent this past Tuesday in Abu Dhabi clinching the sale of up to 60 Rafales to that Gulf paragon of democracy, the United Arab Emirates (UAE).The formerly wimpy Hollande - now enjoying his "resolute", "determined", tough guy image reconversion - has cleverly sold all this as incinerating Islamists in the savannah before they take a one-way Bamako-Paris flight to bomb the Eiffel Tower.

French Special Forces have been on the ground in Mali since early 2012.

The Tuareg-led NMLA (National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad), via one of its leaders, now says it's "ready to help" the former colonial power, billing itself as more knowledgeable about the culture and the terrain than future intervening forces from the CEDEAO (the acronym in French for the Economic Community of Western African States).

Salafi-jihadis in Mali have got a huge problem: they chose the wrong battlefield. If this was Syria, they would have been showered by now with weapons, logistical bases, a London-based "observatory", hours of YouTube videos and all-out diplomatic support by the usual suspects of US, Britain, Turkey, the Gulf petromonarchies and - oui, monsieur - France itself.

Instead, they were slammed by the UN Security Council - faster than a collection of Marvel heroes - duly authorizing a war against them. Their West African neighbors - part of the ECOWAS regional bloc - were given a deadline (late November) to come up with a war plan. This being Africa, nothing happened - and the Islamists kept advancing until a week ago Paris decided to apply some Hollandaise sauce.

Not even a football stadium filled with the best West African shamans can conjure a bunch of disparate - and impoverished - countries to organize an intervening army in short notice, even if the adventure will be fully paid by the West just like the Uganda-led army fighting al-Shabaab in Somalia.

To top it all, this is no cakewalk. The Salafi-jihadis are flush, courtesy of booming cocaine smuggling from South America to Europe via Mali, plus human trafficking. According to the UN Office of Drugs Control, 60% of Europe's cocaine transits Mali. At Paris street prices, that is worth over $11 billion.

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